For Chartreuse, the rural Icelandic studio Flóki served as a refuge in a myriad of ways. Set in a secluded location on the northern tip of the island, a five-hour drive from Reykjavík, the Black Country band’s two-week stay here in the summer of 2024 was one of escape, connection and understanding. They returned home with a special, urgent and necessary new album, Bless You & Be Well.
The band’s debut album, 2023’s Morning Ritual, introduced a group that swerved the traditional tropes of indie-rock bands, instead using their instruments and innovative production techniques in unusual and thrilling ways. “We’ve always almost been anti-band,” the group’s guitarist and singer Mike Wagstaff says. “Whenever we hear something that sounds familiar, we try to fuck it up in some way. ‘It can’t sound like that, it sounds too real!’”
The four-piece are intimately interconnected – brothers Mike (guitar, vocals) and Rory Wagstaff (drums) are joined by Rory’s long-term partner Hattie Wilson (piano, vocals) and Hattie’s childhood friend Perry Lovering (bass) – and on album two, they lean into this unmistakable chemistry and towards sounds and rhythms they had previously shunned. Working with an external producer for the first time in Sam Petts-Davies (The Smile), Mike handed over the production reins and relished slotting back into the band as one part of the puzzle. As Petts-Davies, a calm and easy-going antidote to the band’s self-declared perfectionists, told them: “You are a band and this is how you sound, so let’s just run with it.”
Mike explains this new and revelatory creative relationship: “It’s not that we were loose with it; it was more about not letting ourselves talk our way out of decisions or second-guess choices we were making in the moment. If it sounded good, it stayed. If it didn’t feel right, we tried something else. That was the ethos we shared with Sam when making many of the creative choices for the tracks.”
The idea of being a proper, true band was particularly vital to the members at the time of recording. When heading to Iceland, Lovering was grieving the recent death of his father, while Wilson had just found out that she needed surgery aged 29 after years of pain in her hips. After the recording was finished, she had derotational femoral osteotomy surgery and has since been on crutches and relearning to walk properly again.
“You could feel it in the air,” Hattie says of the context and heaviness the members brought with them to the recording, naturally leading the album to touch on these themes, singing both about themselves and each other. At the same time, it provided an opportunity to forget about it all and find a refuge through which to dive into creativity and playfulness.
Perry adds: “If there was even a sliver of reality or some normal life going on, it would have ended up being a bit more of a reminder of everything and harder to cut off. It was like being in a simulation – nothing else really mattered from the real world.”
Only a band as strongly connected for so many years could create such a space for each other in order to disappear into this album together. Hattie says: “To have those bonds within the band is really special and we can naturally pick up on each other's cues. I don't know if it would work with any other people, or if we would be able to be totally ourselves or as accepting of each other or what anyone's going through.”
In Bless You & Be Well, Chartreuse have made an album inevitably affected by these happenings, but one that shines a light on the power of finding a sanctuary amongst the struggle, through community, friendship, creativity and being in a band. It’s fitting, then, that – after initial hesitation and with some nudges from Petts-Davies – the quartet lock into an irresistible musical groove across the album that embraces their make-up as a band and truly excels.
Whether it’s using criss-crossing guitars reminiscent of Radiohead or earthier acoustic tones, there’s a gorgeous musical alchemy that defines Bless You & Be Well. With ideas of perfection taking a back seat at Petts-Davies’ direction, album highlights ‘Kid Won’t Eat’ and ‘More’ are delightfully rough around the edges, adding bite and grit to songs that thrive on energy and intensity above all.
Lead single ‘Sequence of Voices’ is the best example of the band as an interconnected and united force, crashing forwards in what Mike describes as “an explosion of outward feeling”. A song about the freedom and rush when finally no longer holding in your anxieties, it feels like a true breakthrough. On ‘Fold’, Hattie takes the band to a slower tempo as she sings of trying to hold things together in a relationship when either party hits rocky times.
Elsewhere, ‘Fixin’’ sees Mike find solace in insignificance, while Hattie’s feelings around her imminent surgery and recovery are laid out on the gorgeous ‘I’m Losing It’. ‘Offerings’, meanwhile, sees Hattie reflecting on the pain of those around her but ultimately landing on “the overwhelming feeling that life is a gift”.
While informed by struggle and grief, Bless You & Be Well isn’t an album defined by it. Instead, it’s a window through which to understand both yourself and those around you better and more deeply. It also affirms the power of something as seemingly trivial as being in a band, and of music as a way to understand and move through life
